Beloved New York Community Garden Reopens After 17-Year Fight

The renovated Carmen Pabon Garden opened on Wednesday after a 17-year battle for the green space.

A battle over the garden began in 1999, when developer BFC Partners bulldozed the land to construct the Eastville Gardens residential building.

By Allegra Hobbs
dnainfo
October 27, 2016

Excerpt:

East Village: A community garden on Avenue C that shuttered 17 years ago to make way for a residential development reopened Wednesday — renamed in honor of the gardener and activist who first created the beloved sanctuary when the neighborhood was riddled with drugs and crime.

Gardeners, community members and elected officials celebrated the opening of the newly renovated Carmen Pabon Garden, previously known as El Bello Amanecer Garden, after a years-long battle to preserve a slice of the green space between East Seventh and Eighth streets that for decades served as a gathering place for the community’s most vulnerable.

Although the Avenue C garden today looks very different than it did 20 years ago, its distinctive Loisaida mural, left, has been preserved intact.

Garden founder Carmen Pabon, who used the space to serve the community’s elderly and to feed the homeless population during the 1970s and ’80s, was present at the ribbon-cutting ceremony along with her daughter, Inis Arroyo, who spoke about her mother’s legacy and the importance of the green space.

“Most of the time, when I would get up in the morning and she was gone, she was here,” recalled Arroyo of her childhood in the neighborhood. “This was her paradise, this was la casita where she helps people.”

Just as the garden offered community services during its first life, the newly opened incarnation will be a gathering place for local children and seniors, Arroyo explained.

“This is really important to our community,” she said. “We’re going to open it up to the kids, we’re going to open it up to the schools, we’re going to open it up to the senior homes — it’s just going to be a wonderful, wonderful thing for this neighborhood.”

A battle over the garden began in 1999, when developer BFC Partners bulldozed the land to construct the Eastville Gardens residential building. Two of the three lots comprising the garden were lost to the construction, but the community fought for the preservation of the green space, and ultimately the developer agreed to work alongside the community to restore it.

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